Survey: Data warehouses in no danger from Hadoop

By GCN Staff

Apr 03, 2015

A recent survey by Dimensional Research found that data warehousing is still considered a critical business component, in spite of its challenges of scalability and cost. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they expected to increase their investment in data warehousing, and few reported experimenting with big data and Hadoop.

The State of the Data Warehouse survey asked 319 individuals in public and private sector organizations with responsibility for data initiatives about their experiences, challenges and trends in data warehousing and data analytics.

Interest in big data is high, with 91 percent of respondents indicating they’ve considered an investment, but only 11 percent of respondents have a pilot in place, and just 5 percent have fully deployed a big data initiative. One of the big data roadblocks might be Hadoop, with an overwhelming majority of respondents expressing concerns, specifically about access to expertise.

"Hype has created confusion about what is really happening with big data initiatives," said Diane Hagglund, principal at Dimensional Research. "Although interest in big data is high, this study found that big data initiatives and Hadoop have not diminished the importance of the data warehouse -- data warehousing remains critically important and will not be replaced by Hadoop."

Almost two-thirds of survey participants have data in the cloud – either in SaaS applications like Salesforce.com or in public infrastructure clouds like Amazon AWS. And among the companies with data in the cloud, 79 percent said they are bringing at least some of it into a data warehouse. Only 9 percent are migrating all cloud data into the data warehouse.

Other findings include:

70 percent are increasing their investment in data warehousing;

96 percent say Hadoop will not replace their existing data warehouse; and